A Red Cross vehicle is parked near the damaged office of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, October 2, 2014. (Reuters/Shamil Zhumatov) / Reuters

The Swiss Red Cross worker, who died in Donetsk shelling on Thursday, was killed on a rebel-held territory as a result of an attack from the position controlled by Kiev’s armed forces, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

“We note the hectic reaction of the Kiev authorities, who
hurried to shift the blame for the death of the employee of this
established international organization [Red Cross] from
themselves,” the ministry said.

“Kiev doesn’t want to admit the obvious fact that while the
[attacked] area in Donetsk was situated on territory controlled
by the militia forces, the shelling itself was conducted from
Ukrainian Army positions.”

.@ICRC Please accept our
sincere condolences. He came to help and to save - not to die.
Donbass bloodshed must stop

Moscow condemned the incident as “a blatant violation”
of international humanitarian law and insisted on an objective
and thorough investigation into the matter.

The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry has also expressed its condolences
while putting the incident on the par with “the terrorists
taking the OSCE employees hostage.” The ministry uses the
term ‘terrorists’ to refer to anti-government forces in eastern
Ukraine.

The attack was aimed at the “intimidation of the
international organizations’ representatives, who help to bring
the peace and calm back to Donbass,” Kiev added.

Laurent DuPasquier, 38, a Swiss national who was deputy head of
the Red Cross mission in Donetsk, was killed on Thursday in
shelling which was carried out allegedly from an Uragan
(Hurricane) rocket system, a report by the OSCE said.

The document also stated that 15 minutes after the shelling, the
OSCE observers got a phone call from the head of the
International Red Cross Committee (IRCC) in Kiev, who told them
that the Donetsk office was under attack, and one of the
employees was dead. He had been standing in front of the building
when the shelling began.

Earlier on Friday, First Deputy Prime Minister of the Donetsk
People’s Republic Andrey Purgin also claimed that the rocket that
hit the Red Cross office was launched by the Ukrainian military.

“There’s no question about that. This was a rocket projectile
of the Uragan system. It was, of course, launched by the
Ukrainian side. Its range is up to 40km. That is to say they were
shelling the center of Donetsk, without paying any attention to
the location they were to hit. It just happened that it hit the
Red Cross office,” according to Purgin.